It's a very interesting story, that of my great great aunt Catherine Sugrue, for her husband Joseph Read proclaiming to be Jack the Ripper, and not only that, and so I made a tikok about her. The story: my great great grandfather, Thomas Seagrove, had a sister, Catherine Sugrue. They were of a very dysfunctional family, totally, in the newspapers for thefts, in prison and in the workhouse. Their father Bartholowe was in and out of the workhouse and died there, coughing up blood from tuberculosis. Catherine got in trouble as a girl, when she saw coal by the riverside and took some, because it was cold and she wanted her family to be warm, they being very poor. Because of this she was taken for the rest of her childhood to a Roman Catholic school for wayward girls run by Saint Francis nuns, a place where destitute children could be guided to a better future. She's a beautiful lady and hers is the only photograph I have of my family from that time. Catherine's life was tragic. She worked in a lead factory and died from the lead poisoning. She herself had described it as 'killing work' and that was what it was indeed. Catherine's husband, Joseph, said there was white powder in his food, which could well have been the lead powder that Catherine would have brought home on her clothes. Joseph went completley crazy and believed himself to be Jack the Ripper. Maybe Catherine believed it too and that's why the white lead was in his food. Joseph was obsessed that he was Jack the Ripper, and that was in 1888, when all those girls were being killed by him, and when Joseph went into the asylum that was the end of it, so who knows. I'm contemplating resuming book writing now and that Bartholomew's Garden should not be about him after all, but about his children and specifically the friendship between brother and sister, Thomas and Catherine, and all their struggles, and yes this Jack the Ripper theme. Well, my astrology hints that I can write books. But can I really?! Even I made a tiktok briefly putting my writing ideas out there, hopefully by this to find motivation, encouragement, guidance, anything by which inspiration may come. For this idea about writing a book, I've had it for a long time now, having the ideas but now knowing how to solidify them into something that would really work as a complete story. As I share on tiktok, I am a genealogist, and I'm finding social history so fascinating, and of how my family had really been in it with their poverty and all the consequences of that, which were quite dramatic. Like I do think this could be an interesting book. I've got two families who became connected in Greenwich. Grandfather Barton was a war hero, from the battle of Trafalgar to Egyptian sea battles, and he ended up his life at the Greenwich hospital and his wife Hannah was a nurse there. It was their daughter Eleanor who was put into an orphanage in Whitechapel in London. She would die of tuberculosis as a young mother, and it was her daughter, Maria, who would make friends with another family, the Sugrue's, who were Irish settlers and who were very scandalous. they had come to England during the potato blight that just was tragic for Ireland. So they'd come to find a new life in London. But their life was full of scandal, really big scandal, one of the littlest children dying when their mother was in prison for theft, and the father being blamed for that, for neglecting his family, the children then being put into the workhouse. The children of these two families, Thomas Sugrue and Maria Harrison, ended up in love and making a life together. Thomas's sister, Catherine, as we have seen, died from lead poisoning in the factory she worked at and as I have also said, her husband was talking of being Jack the Ripper. Despite my inspiration to write a book, it is yet again genealogy work that I deeply immerse in, whereas the book writing I postpone. The fascination for genealogy that I have needs to envelop this book project too and to be non-different from it. On researching a little about Jack the Ripper, looking through old newspapers of the time, one theory proposed for the identity of the killer is that he was a Russian, who before the London killings began, had been doing much the same in Paris, for which he'd been put into an asylum, and upon his release moved to London, which is when the killings began there. His belief was that prostitutes could only atone for their sins by being killed. This theory had been presented in a Russian newspaper, the Novosti, and the man they'd named as Nicolai Vassilyeff. He was born in Tiraspol, it is said. Well I see there were two Tiraspol's, one in Belarus and one in Moldova, but the Moldova is more likely as that is nearer to where he studied in university, at Odessa, in Ukraine. It is said that he was a 'fanatical anarchist'. In the 1870's he had moved to Paris, where he'd become crazy and was placed under restraint. But before being lodged in an asylum, Nicolai murdered several unfortunates in Paris under conditions somewhat similar to those of the Whitehchapel crimes, for which he was arrested and thereby ended up in the asylum. This had happened 16 years previous to the Whitechapel killings. Nicolai, known as the 'Mad Russian', had been dismissed from the asylum as cured, after which he moved to London, moving in with the lower classes of his fellow countrymen. After the first Whitechapel murder Nicolai was lost sight of. This subject I made a popular tiktok about. I was on a roll with this tiktok creativity, making another one talking of Jack the Ripper, again in relation to newspaper articles I was seeing. Jack the Rippers identity is an unsolved mystery that has captivated the imagination up to the current day and in it's own time too. So many crazy stories I was discovering from way back then. One article was about four Spanish sailors being out and about with knives and attacking a woman, who in response was calling out 'Murder', for which four other men came to her rescue, who also got attacked. I read of a Whitechapel gang apprehending one woman, who on coming out of a concert had the company of a man walking along with her for a while, who then grabbed her by the throat and pulled her to a place where there was a gang of both women and ruffian men, the first man holding a knife up against her throat and they all stealing her things. In regard to the article about the Russian possible Jack the Ripper, it is believed by researchers that maybe the story was fabricated or elaborated upon. It's actually difficult to know what information shared at the time was authentic and which was put out by journalists to keep the interest of the public and which was sensationalised.
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While staying in London, I visited the area where had lived my Harbridge ancestors, at St John's Court, just off Half Moon Alley. I had already seen on the map that this place no longer existed, but still I wanted to experience being where once had been their home. On arriving at Half Moon Passage I did indeed locate the original place, although it was not named and was just a dead end way between high ugly modern buildings, a place of bins and extractor fans, with not any clue of its olde worlde past. The dead end, once a throughway, was now blocked off by big buildings, Standon House and the Abokado restaurant beside it. Opposite was the now named Little Somerset Street, the same shape as when it had been the original Harrow Alley and Cimber Yard. Yes I had for sure found my ancestral place. Here had lived William Harbridge and Elizabeth née Minsham (Elizabeth being the furest back I had got on my matriarchal line). Their daughter, Sarah, was 13 when she married 21 year old Robert Bunney, a cooper by profession, the newly wed couple also living with Sarahs parents at St Johns Court. I next walked to the family church close by, that of St Botolph Without Aldgate, which I'd walked past a little earlier and had recognised, yes, this was one of our churches. The church was closed, but on the steps sat a bunch of people listening to a man talking. I assumed they were a study group; it was later, reflecting on his words, that I realised this was a guided Jack the Ripper walk. That which I heard: This church had been a hang out for prostitutes, in that they would continually encircle it, strolling round and round, until clients, who were in the know, would approach them. To be able to even do such a trying profession they would drink cheap gin. That was all I heard. I walked around a little garden area to the side of the church, where maybe tramps slept, and as I observed, youngsters were skateboarding in an adjacent park. William Harbridges family, before living at St Johns Court, lived at Cradle Court, just off Aldersgate Street, where was yet another St Botolph Church (there were four St Botolph churches in London). At the Aldersgate St Botolph Church, William Harbridge was baptised in 1738, his parents being William (senior) and Mary Harbridge. When William (the younger) was 23 he married at this same church to Elizabeth Minsham. Cradle Court, I couldn't locate this time round, but did read a reference to it being in these times occupied by warehouses. Nor did I get to visit that specific St Botolph Without Aldersgate church (they were all called 'Without' due to being just outside the town walls). Elizabeth Minsham was 22 when she married William Harbridge in 1763 and it was a quick wedding, by a paid for allegation rather than banns, because Elizabeth was already four months pregnant and beginning to show. It was then at St Johns Court that this family lived and raised various children, in total six girls and one boy, the address of St Johns Court being mentioned in all their baptisms and the church being St Botolph Without Aldgate. Sarah was their second daughter; the others were Elizabeth, Joseph, Mary Jane, Christian and her twin sister Jane. There is another record showing residence at St Johns Court in regard to Sarahs husband, Robert Bunney, who voted using this address during the Westminster elections in 1874. In politics Robert supported Charles Fox who was a radical whig anti-slavery campaigner, advocating individual liberty and religious tolerance. It was on another day that I returned to St Botolph Without Aldgate church; it now being open.
I have it in mind to write a book, nothing new for me really as ideas have often come and yet don't practically manifest. Bartholome Sugrue's tragic life as an Irish immigrant in Greenwich, with all his dysfunctionalism, is inspiring me now. This would be a historical novel. Although, with their not having been a happy ending I'd need to explore the jollity and love and depth of positive life experience inbetween all the sufferings. And do I tie in the parallel Harrison and Barton families, also of Greenwich, who had their own tragedies. Between these two families have been a bucket load of difficulties. There was Eleanor Caroline Barton growing up in a London orphanage, away from her mother, and dying so young of tuberculosis; her mother Hannah taking care of the old and wounded seamen in the Greenwich hospital where once Eleanors own father had lived; and Eleanors partner John William Harrison's brushes with the law, his imprisonment and then joining his daughter Maria in the workhouse, his temporary insanities and ultimately dying from cancer of the tongue; Bartholomew Sugrue's first wife dying from asiatic cholera, and his second wife Catherine going to prison for trying to conceal her daughters theft of a purse; exposure in all Britains newspapers when he is prosecuted for the manslaughter of his own child, revealing their poor standards of life and his drunknness, the child really having wasted away in a refusal to eat out of upset for losing his mother; later, their squatting with other Irish in tumbledown cottages with the authorities trying to throw them out; their residing at Pesters boarding house for the poor in which Catherine worked as a servant in return for lodgings, where also lived for a while one of the prostitutes murdered by Jack the Ripper; Bartholomew eternally in and out of the workhouse, being sent onwards to Poplar for hard labour and severity, and his demise from tuberculosis, dying while coughing up blood; Catherines stroke which paralysed her down one side; young Maria Harrison in and out of the workhouse and into the arms of their son Thomas, himself all too familiar with the workhouse and for a fresh new start they changing the surname from Sugrue to Seagrove, and then their own exposure in newspapers for their dirty home and scruffy children running wild. So, how does one weave a story through all that? And of happier times, hop picking adventures in the Kent countryside, romantic strolls in Greenwich park, for 'there is always the garden', the gaiety of the Greenwich fair and arrival by boat (sailed by my ancestors) of grand functionaries and aristocrats who would feast in the Greenwich inns on whiting (fished by my ancestors) and champagne, rich benefactors joining the workhouse poor at xmas for seasonal celebrations, the songs my ancestors may have sung and the music they danced to. AuthorAuthor Susie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. I was working on my new genealogy passion website, a lot of work there about Bean cousins who had survived the sinking of the Titanic, about the Royal Horse Artillery career of my ancestor Richard Bane, and the beginnings of writing up about my Irish folk. In old newspapers I am finding such interesting articles, like of the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, a date somehow I always remember, and the Titanic story and the grief of so many people who willed their loved ones to have survived, though too many had not. At this I cried. So many stories are there within this great story. Back to writing about the tragic dysfunctional lives of my Irish ancestors, which both moves and fascinates me. On and off I work on my Irish Sugrue's lives in London. There was quite a refugee crisis for the Irish in those days, many Britishers feeling that they were being swamped by this 'dirty' Roman Catholic peasantry, who profited from their English benevolence while hating the Brits and committing crime, prostitution, and drunkard behaviour. And there's not many Brits now who do not have some Irish ancestry in them, for those past Brits who found the Irish lasses rather attractive, being the ones to build bridges, or the attraction of the Irish lads, as in the case of my ancestress Maria Harrison. I do feel this Irish peasant part of myself. I feel it is quite a strong influence in me even. Just as their children stole, so did I as a child. And like them, I am unkempt, messy, unfussed; closer to nature, I suppose, as this feels more natural, trusting all will be well, even in the face of plenty going wrong. Dysfunctional. Yes, I surely am. And when I see now how my Irishers were, my Kerry people, it all makes so much more sense. Minus the alcoholism, no, that's not for me. Not to say that there haven't been times when I've been wild with it and sometimes quite outrageous. And they lived off the system, after all this is survival, and others judged them. Some currents of all of this are still with me. And, even the Roman Catholic love of the holy mother and child, of holy places and holy beings, and submersion of one's being in an awe for this, I know it. My Irish immigrant ancestral research was just about concluded. On seeing one reference, about a lodging house, Pesters, which my people stayed in, I learn that this was also a place of residence for one of Jack the Rippers victims, Catherine Eddowes. I got distracted into watching a whole documentary about Jack the Ripper. With his identity never ascertained, it's the kind of mystery one finds oneself intrigued to try and solve. Even in my dreams I was sifting through what had been presented, trying to work it all out. AuthorSusie Harrison and her hobby of genealogy, always looking into her own and her friends family trees. |
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